Counting the cost of severe weather

Counting the cost of severe weather

Close to $200m in total insurance payments have been made over the past year due to wild weather, according to the Insurance Council of New Zealand Te Kāhui Inihua o Aotearoa.

Floods in late March alone accounted for almost $120m, while storms in June were reported at $15.5m.

Frequent, severe weather events mean a lack of temporary accommodation, supply constraints and rising building costs are being acutely felt by communities – and by insurers.

Westport was hit by a $100m flood in July 2021 and is still feeling the effects.

Head of Claims Operations at Ando, Tony Boon, says the Westport situation – as cliched as it sounds - really is the ‘perfect storm’.

“This is a town that’s being continually impacted by heavy rain events, with the sea level rise making the effect of these events more significant each time,” he says.

“Then add in the challenges around lack of temporary accommodation which not only impacts customers but the workers coming into town to do the reinstatement work.”

Good progress has been made with a $17m temporary accommodation village finally starting to be built in Westport while work continues to repair and rebuild homes.

Tony says they’ve often had to come up with different solutions to house residents in other areas who can’t go home.

“For one claim in Gisborne, albeit it was a fire not flood, we applied our anticipated temporary accommodation costs towards the purchase of a large caravan for the family as there was no temporary accommodation available at all,” he says.

Issues with availability of contractors and all the supply chain challenges that we all face add up to a challenging situation that doesn’t really have a simple solution, and not all of them are ‘insurance problems’ that we can solve.

Tony says it can be difficult for customers to separate the insurance issues from the broader supply chain issues that the industry doesn’t have control over.

“Sometimes our options are extremely limited but we’ll always do our best to support them through some pretty trying circumstances.”

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